Polish stork nest a possible winner

Having the odd bird or two set up home in the corner of your barn is nothing to content with compared to the problems facing Polish farmers.

A huge stork nest spotted in Poland is estimated to weight in at 1.5 tonnes.

Dubbed by the media as a “skyscraper”, it appears to be two nests stacked one on top of the other, according to the social media education blog Crazy Nauka (which translates as Crazy Science.

“Storks often superstructure their nests on top of the existing ones. Record-breaking nests were nearly four metres high! Such nests weigh several tonnes,” said the blog’s creators.

The nest, discovered on the roof of a building in the north-eastern Warmian-Masurian pro-vince, has been estimated at two metres high and 1.5 tonnes in weight.

It is now a strong contender to win a competition, funded by Poland’s education ministry, to find Europe’s largest stork nest.

The stork nest is made up of sticks and branches arranged in the form of a ring, with the birds adding to it almost daily.

There are nests in Poland with a documented history of over 100 years.

However, the number of storks in Poland has been decreasing in recent decades, as land acquisition for agriculture deprives the birds of foraging space.

Poland used to have Europe’s largest stork population but lost that title to Spain in 2015.

“This is because even traditional meadows, traditional pastures, where there are no cows, have been turned into [use for] crops, which from the stork’s perspective is a kind of desert,” said Piotr Tryjanowski, head of the zoology department at the Poznań University of Life Sciences, told Radio Poznań.